PC gaming terminology - what is G-Sync, DirectX, Advanced Optimus and more

pocket-lint.com:

(Pocket-lint) — PC gaming can sometimes seem a bit more intimidating than console gaming, if only for the sheer number of terms bounded about.

There is all manner of technologies, settings, hardware terms and more than might confuse or just puzzle you, so we're here to help clear some of them up. 

If you like to do your gaming on a laptop and you've been using one with an Nvidia graphics card, then the chances are you might have heard the term Advanced Optimus. 

Advanced Optimus is a technology that's designed to work on gaming laptops that use Nvidia's RTX mobile GPUs. This tech intelligently switches between your laptop's integrated graphics and discrete GPU in order to save power. Only using the full power of the GPU when it's needed. Thereby saving battery without negatively impacting performance. 

Ray tracing is a setting that you'll find in many of the best modern PC games that enhances the lighting of the games by creating realistic shadows, reflections and beams of light. Ray tracing is something Nvidia has been pushing since the launch of its RTX 20-series graphics cards. But it's also available with DirectX Raytracing. 

Generally, ray tracing requires a more powerful PC and high-end graphics card and using it can come with a penalty in terms of performance and frame rates that can be countered to some degree with DLSS. 

DLSS, aka Deep Learning Super Sampling is clever technology from Nvidia which uses artificial intelligence to upscale the visuals of your game. This means that your PC can render the game at a lower resolution (which is less taxing on your hardware) but output a higher resolution to your gaming monitor. 

Through DLSS you can get higher frame rates when playing at 4K (for example) and get the